


Danger By Deathwish

by AnnaTheFallen



Category: Nancy Drew (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Gun Violence, Mass shooting, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, violent fish death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 15:25:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11739852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaTheFallen/pseuds/AnnaTheFallen
Summary: Dieter Von Schwesterkrank is used to the drama of living in the public eye... but when the woman of his dreams turns out to be a magnet for mortal peril, he may not be able to stomach it. A Danger by Design fic. (language, violence, sexual implications)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s note: This story is told as though the events of Danger by Design have not yet transpired. I’ve done my best to really flesh out certain characters in a way that wasn’t possible in the game and bring them to life as three-dimensional people instead of lifeless NPC pawns in the Danger by Design plotline. It’s my work, so there may be foul language interspersed, and suggestions of sex. There are also graphic depictions of violence (and a big content warning for a mass shooting).

 Over Skype, Heather told me Dieter von Schwesterkrank had a great ass. She told me he loved the color blue, that he had a pet snake named Dektol, and that he played the guitar. Heather told me plenty about him before I even met him. Under most circumstances, “less is more” doesn’t apply to digging for information on your new overseas job, but I cursed Heather’s affectionate descriptions of Dieter’s jawline and thighs when Dieter opened the door of his office in a bathrobe.

            He had a foul grimace on his face, but to be honest, I just figured he looked at everyone like that. “Who are you?” His voice wasn’t exactly buttery, but it was pleasant.

            “Elizabeth Clarke,” I said. “You hired me about the-”

            He interrupted, “Shhh, shut up! Not here!” He grabbed my arm and yanked me inside, slamming and bolting the door behind us. “Sit.” He pointed to the chair opposite his desk.

            Fish tank, acoustic guitar, plenty of photography paraphernalia, old wood paneling…

            “Sit!” he demanded.

            I sat.

            He didn’t. “Wait right there and don’t touch anything,” he ordered, and then went into an adjoining room and slammed the door.

            “Oookay,” I said under my breath.

            Now, before I continue, just remember that the trainwreck I’m telling you about is just a result of a ridiculous chain reaction brought on by my indiscreet behavior. I’m pretty sure everything from this point forward is my fault - fruit of a poisoned tree and all that.

            I went over to the sofa and picked up Dieter’s guitar.

            Yeah. Deathwish. Angry German guy. I get it.

            I love guitars. I can’t identify the different brands, spout the history of the instrument, or play much more than chords, but man, string instruments are beautiful. I saw the light from the window glimmering on the side of Dieter’s guitar and I just had to pick it up and see if it really was made of magic. I sat on the couch with it and felt the weight of the thing in my arms. When I tried to strum a C chord, however, I think I was unpleasantly jolted out of my skin a little bit. When was the last time this guy had tuned his goddamn guitar? Heather had said Dieter played the guitar, but obviously he hadn’t for quite some time.

            When Dieter re-entered the office, I was on his sofa playing his guitar. Obviously that was my first mistake. “What the hell are you doing? Give me that!”

            “I’m sorry,” I said as he yanked the instrument out of my hands and shooed me off of the couch. “It was so out of tune…” I cringed and returned to the chair opposite his desk.

            “I am tempted to fire you here and now, except Heather thinks you are brilliant and I am out of options.” He handed me a manila folder. “Look.”

            I flipped through the contents of the folder. “These photos”-

            “Were taken without my knowledge.”

            “Well obviously,” I said. “But what can I do? I’m not a PI or a bodyguard.”

            “You misunderstand me,” he replied, grabbing the photos out of my hands. “I am not hiring you to deal with the photos. I’m already paying someone for that. I’m hiring you as a lab assistant while my attention is divided.”

            I opened my mouth to say something, but then realized I hadn’t thought of something to say. Brow furrowed, I stared at Dieter.

            He stared back for a few seconds, blue eyes intense as he searched my face. “What is the problem? Heather says you are a quick learner and have an eye for photographic composition.” He shoved the file into a drawer on his desk, which he locked with a key he put in his pocket.

            “I don’t have lab experience,” I said bluntly.

            “Well obviously not. I’ll have to train you,” said Dieter. “Which will be a pain.”

            “Great.” I rolled my eyes. “I can’t wait to be the thorn in your side.”

            Dieter only glared at me.

\----

            “STOP BATH! STOP BATH!”

            For what must have been the hundredth time that morning, I shook the developer fluid off of a perfectly developed print and dunked it in the stop bath as fast as I possibly could, to the background chorus of Dieter shrieking.

            If it wasn’t, “STOP BATH!” it was, “CHANGE THE F-STOP! I SHOULD FIRE YOU!”

            Perhaps the worst part was how, after hours of work, we would end up with a drying rack full of perfectly good prints, which he would then look over and declare unsuitable for a portfolio. Then, every print, every close-up shot of knitted fabric or seams on a pantsuit, every alluring and yet utterly boring photo I had spent so much time and energy developing, would go into the trash.

            The contrast wasn’t right. The exposure was too much. The exposure was too little. F-stops and developer and fixer, not to mention all kinds of buttons and levers and switches - no wonder Dieter was on edge all the time.

            “Excuse me?” Dieter said.

            Oops. Had I said that last part aloud? “Um…”

            “You American girls never keep your mouths shut when you ought to.”

            “It’s one of my strong suits,” I retorted, dunking a photo of an open-toed pump in fixer.

            He sneered. “You should consider learning another talent.”

            I held up the tongs. “Yeah, that’s me, never learns anything new!”

            “You call this learning?’ he barked at me. “It’s been a week and it is still amateur hour in here. I’ve had more success teaching my snake to play football!”

            Maybe it was the stress of being expected to learn everything there is to know about photography in two weeks, or maybe it was Dieter’s voice in my head, or hell, even being compared to a football-playing snake. Any way you spin it, just as I was about to spit my best comeback yet, my lower lip trembled just a little bit. Suddenly I found myself feeling very naked in front of Dieter. Whatever I’d been about to snap at him dissolved into my sudden panic. I tossed the tongs in Dieter’s general direction and ran out of the room.

\----

            Pont Neuf was a small park, lush and green, with intriguing kinetic sculptures and a French Revolution monument dispersed throughout and vendors selling knick-knacks here and there. I ignored a particularly obnoxious squirrel and sat down on a bench. Tears came as soon as I found a moment of peace. The vendors made obvious efforts to pretend they didn’t see me; I appreciated the illusion of privacy. Every time I closed my eyes, there was Dieter von Schwesterkrank’s steely blue stare, stuck on the insides of my eyelids. “Amateur hour.” I put my face in my hands and sobbed in earnest. I knew I was fired.

“I make most of my assistants cry.”

            I jumped, shocked out of my misery. Dieter sat at the other end of the bench, clearly uncomfortable and looking deliberately away from me. “Do you stalk all of them in the park?” I asked bluntly.

            He looked briefly at my face, and then quickly away again. He put a folded blue handkerchief in the middle of the bench between us. He was obviously struggling with the concept of an actual apology, but I could tell what he meant.

            After a hesitant moment, I took the handkerchief and dabbed at my eyes and nose. It was quiet again.

            “I have never had a pair of tongs thrown at my face,” said Dieter conversationally, breaking the silence.

            I had to smile.

            He glanced over at me at that moment and, though he turned his head to hide it, I caught him smiling back.

            The handkerchief smelled like him. I mentally slapped myself. What an unnecessary thought…

            “If it means anything, I admire your tenacity,” said Dieter as we rode the metro back to la Rue du Bac. “Do you know how many prints I made you throw out?”

            I shook my head and stared at my lap.

            “318.”

            “I wanted to get it right,” I mumbled.

            He chuckled. “But you did, Elizabeth,” he said. “You got it perfect on the third try.”

            I stared at him, beginning to comprehend. “You…”

            He held his hands up in a gesture of innocence. “I wanted to see how long it would take you to snap.”

            I lobbed the soggy handkerchief into his face and felt the heat rising in my cheeks.

            “I probably deserved that,” he said.

\----

            The envelope contained a spare key to his office and a few laminated emergency instructions.

            “One more thing,” he added, standing uncomfortably in the doorway. He fished out of his pocket an intricate switchblade.

            “What’s this for?”

            “Open it,” he said. “Careful, it’s razor-sharp.”

            A sticker inside the knife handle was too far inside the knife to see. “What is it?”

            “In case you should need them,” he said in my ear. “Computer codes.”

            “I hope none of these disasters you’re preparing me for actually happen,” I moaned. Great, Dieter was actually 007 and I was going to get killed or kidnapped while he was out catching enemy spies.

“I’d be surprised if they did,” he chuckled. “But better safe than sorry, where you’re concerned.”

I shifted in place nervously, but not entirely at the prospect of a disaster. “What if someone comes looking for you?” I asked.

            “Everyone who matters has been informed of the circumstances,” he said. “As for anyone else, tell them to leave a message. I’ll be back around 10:00pm. Don’t worry, I can’t imagine anyone taking issue with you.” The way his eyes roved over me seemed to add a double-entendre to those words.

            I avoided eye contact. “Great, see you at 10:00!” I said, my face growing hot. “Good luck, hope you catch him! Or her. Whoever!”

 For the rest of the morning, I cursed myself internally. _My social skills are officially grounded for sneaking out._

The roll of film on the desk took priority until I heard the front door open at around 12:30pm and hung up a print to drip dry. “Hey, can I help you?” I said.

            The man in Dieter’s office looked surprised to see me. “Who are you?” he asked.

            “Elizabeth Clarke. I’d shake your hand,” I said. “But mine are covered in chemicals. Do you need something from Di- from M. Von Schwesterkrank?”

            “Oh,” he said, eyes darting around the office before settling on me. He flashed a smile with brilliant white teeth. “It’s merely a social call, love. It can wait.” He admired a print on Dieter’s desk. His accent was English.

            “Shall I take a message?” I said. He was handsome.

            “No, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’d rather just return when Von Schwesterkrank is in the office.” He peered into the fish tank. “This is actually horrific animal abuse,” he said, pointing to the fish. “Goldfish can grow up to 26 centimeters long if they’re allowed to thrive in a 50 gallon tank, and live for eight years.”

            “I’ll make a suggestion when he gets back,” I said. “Not so sure it’s going to be well received.”

            He laughed. “Von Schwesterkrank has a short fuse. How long have you been working for him?”

            “Two days.” I reached into the darkroom and shut off the red light. “Incidentally, that’s also how long I’ve been developing prints.”

            “Did you do this one?” He held up a close-up photo of the clasp of a leather handbag.

            I nodded. “Fashion was never my thing, but so far, I like photography.”

            “This is gorgeous,” he said, holding the print, but his eyes were on me. “I’d love to have you visit my workplace. We do mostly digital editing.”

            My heart skipped a beat. _The print is gorgeous? Or I’m gorgeous? Why don’t people say what they mean around here?_ “That would be very cool,” I stammered.

            “When do you get off of work, love?” he said, smirking. “Because I know the clandestine location of the best hot dog in Paris and I’ve been dying to share the secret with a beautiful darkroom prodigy.”

            My face felt so very warm. “I don’t get off until 10:00pm,” I said, slightly crestfallen.

            “That is a bit late for a hot dog,” he said, running his fingers through his fine blond hair. “How about now? This is when Von Schwesterkrank takes a lunch break…” I furrowed my brow. “At least, I assume he does,” he amended hurriedly. “12:30 is a good time for lunch, don’t you think?”

            I hesitated. It _was_ when Dieter took his break. “Yeah, I guess I can spare 45 minutes. Let me clean up.”

            He grinned. “You don’t know my name.”

            “Am I going to regret this once I find out?” I called from the other room, over the sound of the sink.

            “Roger Traquenard.” I looked back to see if he was kidding, but he had a straight face.

            “You mean like…” I trailed off.

            He rolled his eyes. “Jean Michel, the very same.”

            “He’s your father?” I squinted at the ID card he flashed me.

            “Yeah, Dad’s got his finger on the pulse of fashion worldwide,” said Roger. “If only he had his finger on the pulse of his own family instead…”

            “Are you estranged?”

            “That’s a succinct way of putting it,” said Roger, looking at his watch. “Come on – we’ve wasted four minutes of your break already and we haven’t set foot outside this office! Don’t you know we’re on a tight schedule?”

            “I can allow myself a whole hour if you promise not to tell,” I teased.

            “But what if M. Von Schwesterkrank were to return and find that you’d been swept off your feet by a handsome digital photographer?” he said.

            “First of all, there has been minimal ‘sweeping,’” I said, grabbing my purse. He mimed being wounded by an arrow. “And second of all, I highly doubt that Dieter cares about any associations I have with men.”

            “Then he has been teaching you to develop photos with his eyes closed.”

            “Can’t a man and his employee maintain a professional relationship?” I protested as we left the building. I shoved the code knife into my back pocket.

            “Come work for me and see what the answer is,” he said.

            “I’ll have to decline that offer,” I retorted. “I’m a respectable employee of M. Dieter Von Schwesterkrank.”

            He laughed. “At least you’ve got a sense of humor. More than one of those comments warranted a slap across the face.”

            “All of them,” I muttered.

            “What did you say?” He cupped his ear. “You _don’t_ want lunch? Well, alright. Just when I thought we were getting on.”

            I pushed him playfully and we both broke out laughing.

\----

            Roger was correct – it was a damn good hot dog.

            I worked for four more hours straight, before I poked my head out of the darkroom and realized it was getting late. 5:15pm. The street lamps were coming on outside and my stomach was growling again. Thankfully, the office was only a block away from a convenience store, so I pulled the blinds down, locked the door behind me, and made a ten minute trip down the street.

            When I returned to the office, I stopped cold. I had definitely turned that light off before I left. I ran up the steps and reached for the doorknob, but the door was open a crack. Heart pounding like a drum in my chest, I steeled myself and threw the door open. There was no one there. There was nothing in the darkroom either, except… What was that? It sounded like dripping.

            I approached the chemical baths. I had hung up the prints to dry before I left, but there was a single piece of paper floating in the fixer. I turned it over. It was black, all exposed except for the white letters: ELIZABETH.

            I pulled it out and rinsed it. _Who is this message for? Dieter… or me?_ I checked my watch. It was only 5:30. I took the print out to the front room and put it on the desk. As I was deliberating whether to call Dieter or not, a buzzing noise caught my attention. It was coming from the bookshelf. It sounded like the fish tank filter was broken. When I got closer, I froze. The filter wasn’t broken; it just wasn’t filtering any water. By which I mean, there was no water. “Oh my god!” I cried. The fish were still alive, wriggling on the floor of the tank. Shaking, I yanked the plug out of the electrical outlet and ran to the bathroom with the tank of Dieter’s dying pets. It wasn’t filtered and the little guys could get sick, but I didn’t have time to come up with a better plan.

When I’d filled the tank most of the way, I set it down on the bathroom floor and sat down next to it, crying my eyes out. The fish started to swim again, some of them lethargically. I wiped my eyes and speed-dialed Dieter. “Pick up, pick up,” I said as his phone rang.

“Can this wait?” he snapped. “I’m not on vacation, Elizabeth.”

I burst into tears again. “Oh my god, Dieter, you have to come back here,” I hiccupped.

“What’s the matter?” He sounded alarmed.

“Someone broke into the office,” I sobbed. “I was only gone for ten minutes!”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said sharply. “Don’t let anyone in but me.”

“Should I call the police?” I said.

“Definitely not.” He hung up.

Sniffling, I picked up the fish tank, now heavy, and carried it back to the bookshelf. I sank to the floor in front of Dieter’s desk.

\----

            The door flew open. “Elizabeth?” yelled Dieter.

            I stood up. “I’m right here,” I said. “I’m fine”-

            He interrupted me by shoving a bunch of stuff off the sofa and pushing me down onto it.

            “I’m okay,” I insisted.

            “I’ll be more inclined to believe that when you let go of my hand.”

            I looked down. Sure enough, I had his hand in a vice-like grip. “Sorry,” I said, and took my hand away, only to have him grab it again. “It wasn’t really that bad,” I said.

            “Why do you smell like fish?” he probed.

            I looked up into his eyes, and started crying again. “They drained the tank,” I said, my voice muffled by his shoulder. Whatever I was expecting, it was not a hug. “I came back and… and…”

            “You’ve been crying over my fish?” he said incredulously.

            “They were lying there, dying,” I said. “It was horrible!”

            “Did they do anything _besides_ try to kill my fish?” he pressed.

            “They printed something,” I said. “It was in the fixer. I put it on your desk.”

He reluctantly let go of me. He stared blankly at the print for a long moment.

“What’s the matter?” I said quietly.

“Stalking me is one thing,” he said. “But this is unacceptable.” He looked at me, eyes burning with anger.

“It’s still about you,” I said. “I’m not in danger.”

“He knows who you are,” he said. “That puts you in extreme danger.”

“He hasn’t done anything but make threats, right?” I said. “Besides, haven’t you found any leads yet?”

“You’re fired,” he said, throwing the print down onto his desk.

“What?”

“Go home. Go back to America,” he said. “You’re not safe here.”

“And you’ll hire someone else to do my job,” I said, standing up. “And then _they’ll_ be in danger.”

“At least I can live with that,” he said.

I stared at him, open-mouthed, trying to gauge how serious he was being. “You can fire me,” I said finally. “But you can’t make me leave the country.”

“It’s the tongs all over again,” he sighed. “Only this time, your stubbornness could cost you your safety.”

“You don’t get to decide my life for me,” I said, grabbing my purse and my jacket. “However you feel about me doesn’t give you a pass to play god.”

I dropped the blue handkerchief on his desk before I left and slammed the door behind me.

He watched me go in strained silence.


	2. Chapter 2

_“Hi, Roger. It’s Elizabeth. As it turns out, I no longer have a job, and since I’m in the country indefinitely, I figured I’d give you a call. Not necessarily about a job, although I may need help navigating the Parisian classified ads. Anyway, give me a call whenever, because it seems like I may have some free time in the next couple of days.”_

            “Elizabeth? You okay?” Heather peeked in on me for the fifth time in that hour.

            “I’m alright, Heather,” I insisted every time, but she just kept shaking her head like she didn’t believe me.

            “I know you’re holding something back,” she said. “There’s no way he fired you out of the blue and you said, ‘Okey-dokey! Let me get out of your hair!’”

            “I wish you’d drop it.”

            “I wish I had a million euros,” she said, handing me a mug of hot chocolate.

            My phone rang. “Well, sit tight,” I said. “It looks like the lottery called me back.”

            “Am I to understand that there’s a young lady wandering Paris alone, unattached and unemployed?” said Roger.

            “It definitely sounded better when I said it,” I said.

            “Is the young lady, by any chance, available tomorrow at 9:00am to take a tour of TechImage?”

            “Your company?” I said.

            “Oh, don’t call it that – it makes me sound like some kind of stuffy CEO type. I’d much rather people referred to it as _un atelier_.”

            “You gotta help me with that one,” I admitted. “I don’t have my translator app open.”

            “A studio! If you’d like to come and visit L’Atelier TechImage, we’d love to have you.”

            “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “At what address can I find _l’atelier_?”

            “Oh, no,” he exclaimed. “You needn’t take the metro all that way. I’ll send a car.”

            There followed several minutes of bickering over whether the car would be necessary. I lost. After I hung up the phone, with the agreement that I would meet Roger in front of Heather’s apartment the next day, I gazed at the screen. It was like Dieter’s phone number was staring back at me. I fingered his knife in my pocket.

\----

            L’Atelier TechImage was smaller than what I had pictured. It was housed in an old stone building.

            “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, as he slid his keycard at the door. “A high tech company run out of a hundred-year-old building.”

            “Have you ever been to Minette’s House of Design?” I said, taking in the busy scene in front of me. Several busy interns nearly bowled me over on their way to the elevator with huge stacks of paper and envelopes.

            “No, but it rings a bell,” he said. “Isn’t Von Schwesterkrank her lapdog?”

            I winced. What a totally rude thing to say… and I mean that literally. I got the feeling Roger was reading into my low spirits in conjunction with my being fired by Dieter. “What I mean is, she operates out of a windmill that’s been standing since before the French Revolution.”

            “Does she now?” he said. He sounded impressed.

            “My best friend Heather works there.” I scribbled my name on a sticker and stuck it on my chest. “There’s a renovated office space, but Minette does all her work in the original core of the windmill.”

            “These fashion types are bizarre,” said Roger. “I’ve washed my hands of the whole thing.”

            “What’s your subject of choice, then?” I queried.

            He led me down a hallway lined with photos. “Now this,” he said, gesturing grandly. “Is what I do.”

            The first print that caught my eye was a photo of a singer onstage. The stage lights cast a brilliant purple glow on her face. “You’re a performance photographer,” I said, examining each dramatic shot. “A really good performance photographer,” I added. “If you do all the photography, then who are all the other people in this building?”

            “You would cheat me out of the opportunity to pad someone’s resume?” he said, laughing. “No, really, I can use all the studio help I can get; for that matter, who do you think carries my stuff while I’m shooting?”

            “These are digital prints,” I observed. “That gives you a distinct advantage in terms of experimental techniques.”

            “You’ve got a keen eye.” He led me up a staircase to an open, white office. “I never was one for all the chemical baths and the red lights. Give me a bright, clean studio any day.”

            _Between you and me, I’ll take the red light._

\----

            I told Roger, politely, how great his studio was; how exciting his job must be, getting up close to performers; and how neat digital photography and computer manipulation was. Honestly, though, I have never been so bored in my life as I was walking through TechImage Studios. Blah blah blah, buttons and switches, blah blah blah, printer ink specifications. Ick. Forget about it.

            He did ask me to dinner, although I was becoming more and more disenchanted with Roger Traquenard as the day went on. I told him I would absolutely be at his place at 6:00 the next day. It’s not like I had anything to do instead. He dropped me off in front of Heather’s place.

            I figured Heather would be the one to ask about appropriate attire for dinner at a guy’s house. Not surprisingly, she was full of ideas. “It’s not what you wear,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s what you wear underneath.”

            “You’re kidding, right?” I complained. “Come on, I met him three days ago. There’s no way he’s going to want to do that.”

            “I’m just saying,” she said. “If _you_ want to do that, then you might as well dress for it.”

            “I don’t know if I want to,” I admitted. “I barely know the guy, and his studio is boring as hell.”

            Heather snorted.

            “It’s true!” I said. “I don’t even know why I agreed to dinner.”

            “It’s not like he’s going to poison you with his boring personality,” said Heather, rolling her eyes. “Besides, he’s a Traquenard! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

            “I’d rather just stay here and watch weird French movies with you,” I said.

            “You can’t spend the rest of your life pining over Dieter.”

            I looked up in alarm. “What?”

            “Don’t even lie to me,” said Heather. “You two have a Thing.”

            “That’s ridiculous.”

            “You stare at your phone all day like your heart is broken into a gazillion pieces, and you’re thinking about passing up a date with Roger Traquenard. Case closed,” she said.

            “Fine,” I said irately. “I’m having dinner with Roger.”

            “Great,” said Heather. “Now let’s dress you up like a human Barbie doll!”

            “‘Unemployed Gold-Digger Barbie,’” I said, and she swatted my arm.

\----

            Roger took my coat at the door. “I’m glad you could make it,” he said. The apartment was more like a loft. The kitchen opened into the dining area and the spacious sitting room.

            “Your place is nice,” I said, slightly self-conscious of my exposed back. Halter tops are weird. Thankfully, Heather had deemed my favorite jeans appropriate enough for the occasion. Begrudgingly. Once a fashion student, always a fashion student.

            “Dinner will be ready in half an hour,” said Roger brightly. “Sorry, I was trying to have it ready by the time you arrived, but it’s dangerous to undercook a chicken.”

            “No, don’t worry,” I reassured him. “I’m glad you didn’t try to serve up salmonella.”

            His face fell slightly. Oops, there I went with the mouthy American girl humor.

            “It smells really good,” I insisted. “I don’t mind waiting a few minutes.”

            Roger grinned. “We Traquenards love our food!” At the kitchen island, he poured me a glass of wine.

            “I hope you’re not expecting much in the way of wine conversation,” I warned him. “I’m not even legally allowed to drink, where I come from.”

            “Yes, very silly, that,” he said, taking a sip. “That’s why I picked a good one for you.”

            I took a sip of the murky liquid. “It’s good,” I lied. I hate wine. Give me a good beer any day (unless I’m with my family, in which case I don’t know the difference and I’ll have a lemonade, thanks!). Dieter had opened a couple of bottles one evening after we’d cleaned up the darkroom for the night. “Here,” he growled.

            “Really?” I said. The man had just spent over seven hours yelling at me about F-stops.

            “Unless you prefer your alcohol fruit-flavored?” he snorted.

            I grabbed the beer. “Drinking is in one corner of my life, and fruit is in the opposite one,” I said.

            “I’ll drink to that,” said Dieter.

            I looked up at Roger. His eyes studied me intently. “What’s the matter?” I said.

            “You went somewhere, just then,” he murmured.

            “It was nowhere,” I said. He smirked. “I’m all here,” I insisted.

            “You’re not,” he said. A timer dinged. “But let me bring you back.”

We finally sat down to eat. The dining table sat at least twelve, so it was almost awkward for the two of us to sit down for a meal. “Do you have guests often?” I said. “Family?” I admit, I was still curious about the details of Roger’s estrangement.

“Not family,” he said, and drained his wine glass. He poured another. “They’ve washed their hands of me, I expect.”

“What on earth can you have done to earn that kind of treatment?” I asked.

“What indeed,” he spat. “I know you’ve heard of my father, Jean Michel Traquenard.”

“He’s the editor of Glam Glam magazine, isn’t he?” I drew on Heather’s idle chatter about the fashion world. She seemed to live and breathe the industry.

“You’d think running an internationally acclaimed fashion rag would have taught him a lesson in expanding one’s horizons,” said Roger, cutting violently into a piece of chicken. “But my father insists that he will welcome me back into the fold when I abandon my ‘unfortunate dalliance’ from the fashion world.”

“That seems unfair,” I said.

“It would mean more if he’d ever been much of a father to begin with,” replied Roger.

I took a bite so I wouldn’t have to say anything.

“When I was old enough to speak, I was old enough to go to boarding school,” he said. “I grew up in England, but only because he shipped me there to get rid of me.”

“I guess some people can only handle one job,” I said. “Fashion was his.”

“He never loved anything that wasn’t stitched by a designer.”

“Roger, do you mind if I use your restroom?” I said.

“Not at all,” he said, picking at his food as if the thought of his father and Glam Glam Magazine still had him distracted. “It’s through that door, and then the third on the right. Through the guest bedroom.”

“Thanks.” _Third on the right. Third on the right._

I closed the first door behind me and switched on the light. _Third on the right._ There it was. When I left the guest room a minute later, I headed for the door to the open space, where Roger was, but then something caught my attention.

The door at the end of the hall was ajar, and the red light shining through the cracks suggested that it definitely wasn’t a closet. I peeked out at the dining table again. Roger spilled a glass of wine in his frustration. I figured that should keep him occupied for a while. I closed the door again and turned back to the source of the red light. Could it be? I opened the door wider. It could. Roger had a secret darkroom. The black curtain over the doorway was pulled back. I entered despite my better judgement.

It was much smaller than Dieter’s darkroom. It appeared to have been another bathroom once. Roger had obviously gutted it and replaced the toilet with an enlarger. My brow furrowed. He hadn’t mentioned film to me at all. It seemed like the kind of thing he definitely would have bragged about. Then, I looked up. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like eating dinner anymore.

Hanging from numerous clothes lines from one side of the room to the other were 8”x10” prints of Dieter. “Oh no,” I whispered. Some of the photos were taken through his office window. Others were taken on the street, from hidden vantage points. Still more were of Dieter in shops, delivering envelopes of photos to various people, and in various states of undress. I ran out of the room, heart pounding.

I grabbed my phone and dialed Dieter, but he didn’t pick up. “Dieter, it’s Elizabeth,” I whispered frantically at the tone. “I know who’s been stalking you. His name is”-

“Elizabeth, whatever is the matter?” said a cold voice right behind me. I froze. Roger, arms crossed, stood staring at me like a snake sizing up its prey.

“I was just calling my roommate,” I said. “I had to tell her I’m going to be a little late!”

He stood like a statue. “The food is getting cold.” He grabbed my upper arm and maneuvered me back into my seat.

“You’re a very good cook,” I said, with unconvincing false enthusiasm. My smile faltered.

He tore a chunk of bread off with his teeth but didn’t sit down. “Do you know why my business still operates out of that French Revolution dump?” he said.

I shook my head slowly.

“It’s because we don’t have the funds to open a decent studio.” He barked a laugh.

I stared at him.

“Do you know what happens when an established member of the photography business slanders you in front of the entire world?” he said.

“I can’t imagine.”

“Well try,” he ordered, throwing the bread down on the table. “Because _Monsieur_ Dieter Von Schwesterkrank did quite a number on my profit margins this year.”

“No way,” I said skeptically. “He wouldn’t”-

“He would,” interrupted Roger, kicking his chair over. “Beloved Dieter says I’m an amateur. Beloved Dieter says charging clients for digital photography isn’t a business but extortion!” He yanked the tablecloth off the table, along with our plates, glasses, and silverware. Everything fell to the floor with a crash.

I stood up and backed away slowly.

He advanced toward me. “Beloved Dieter can say whatever he wants to say,” he hissed. “But no, that’s not good enough for him. No, Beloved Dieter has to slander me in front of my father!”

I stopped. “Oh my god,” I said. “Your dad published an article calling your business a sham!”

“Family first,” laughed Roger. “That’s why I’m saving dear old dad for last.”

“For what?” My eyes widened. I ran behind the kitchen island and groped around the countertops for a weapon.

“What do you think?” he said.

I grabbed a bottle of wine and lobbed it at him. “I think you’re crazy,” I shouted, stumbling towards the door.

While I fumbled with the lock, I felt a hand on my shoulder. He grabbed me and threw me to the floor. He grabbed my phone, which had fallen out of my pocket and skidded across the floor, and smashed it against the wall. “Are you going to slander me too, then?” he mocked.

I was stunned by the fall. As he dragged me across the floor by the ankle, I yelled, “People know where I am! They’ll find you, you sick bastard!”

“Sick? Really?” he grunted, struggling to bind my ankles together as I continued to yell and kick. “I’m not the one with a fetish for professional photographers.”

“What are you doing?” I screamed, straining against the zip tie around my wrists. “You can’t just kill us all! What’s the endgame, Roger? Jail?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Roger, stuffing a gag into my mouth. “It’s the big picture, love. I’m taking down the industry.”

I tried to scream, “Talk about bad press!” but he was too busy dragging me into the darkroom.

“I’m done getting crapped on by people like you,” he yelled as he kicked my bound and gagged body into the corner of the darkroom. “You all think you’re better than me? Well, my flight out of this wretched country leaves tonight.” He grabbed two large containers of fluid. Through my loose hair I only saw the word “INFLAMMABLE.” “I’ll be done by then,” said Roger, chuckling. “Who’s better now?” The door slammed. I heard a key in the lock, the splashing of liquid outside, and then Roger’s muffled yell of, “Say goodbye to your hot German boyfriend!”

His footsteps faded out and I heard the front door slam, but I had bigger problems than Roger Traquenard and his unhinged revenge fantasy. Smoke started to seep under the door of the darkroom. Whatever _liquide inflammable_ Roger had poured everywhere was doing its job. I struggled against the binds, but they were too tight. I couldn’t scream for help. I looked around frantically for something I could reach that could cut a zip tie. I could hear the flames lapping at the walls.

            _I’m going to die here._

            The liquid inside the darkroom caught fire.

            _My visa hasn’t even expired._

            The cabinets started to catch fire.

            _I haven’t called my parents._

            It got harder and harder to breathe.

_Dieter’s going to be pissed._

My eyes started to water, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the heat or because I was scared. I lay still and waited for the fire to claim me.

_… Wait a minute._

_Dieter!_ I struggled to sit up on my knees. _Dieter. Dieter. Oh my god, duh!_ I had to get at my back pocket. I had to push my shoulders all the way back, allowing me to fish for the thing with one of my tied hands. I couldn’t reach. I was sweating. My heart was racing. I didn’t have time to calm down. My hand closed around Dieter’s knife.

“Okay,” I said into the gag in my mouth. “How do we do this?” I flipped the blade out. The easiest part was cutting the ties around my ankles. With my legs free, I could stand up, but I sliced myself four times by accident while fumbling with the knife trying to free my hands. I made a noise halfway between a grunt and a scream.

The fire was getting closer. It was getting really hot.

I knelt down with my feet together, suddenly feeling very lucky that Heather had let me wear my combat boots. If I kept my balance, I could hold the handle of the knife between my heels. I pushed my shoulders back again. “Come on, come on,” I groaned, still muffled by the gag. I dropped the knife.

The room was an oven.

I picked the knife back up and put it back between the heels of my boots. _This has to work. It has to,_ I thought. I got the blade up against the zip tie. With a sawing motion, a little patience, and a lot of adrenaline, I was able to cut through most of the plastic zip tie.

The fire was inches from me.

I tore the zip tie apart and grabbed a towel off the counter trying to smother the fire so I could break the door down. It was easier than I thought it would be, although I was pretty sure I’d feel it in my shoulder the next day. I beat flames down as I ran at full speed through the burning apartment. I ripped the gag off as I ran. Outside the door, I put the knife back into my pocket. What had Roger said? “Say goodbye to your hot German boyfriend!” In spite of the immense heat, a chill ran down my spine.

I kept running. I ran until my breaths raked my throat and my muscles threatened to give out. I passively noticed a burn on my left leg from Roger’s apartment. Undoubtedly, I looked out of place, sprinting down la Rue du Bac; my clothes were burnt and torn, my hair was a mess, and soot and sweat commingled on my face.

The light was on in Dieter’s office. I put my ear to the door, trying to hear through my heavy gasps for breath. There were two voices. I threw open the door with a bang and found Roger with a gun pointed at Dieter’s head. When Roger saw me, his eyes widened and he went to pull the trigger, but not before I grabbed Dieter’s guitar from against the wall and swung it as hard as I could against his head. A shot rang out and the bullet hit the corner of the room.

Roger, dazed, attempted to get up and run away, but Dieter was already on the phone with the police as he stumbled out into the street.

As I caught my breath, Dieter hung up the phone. “The police will pick him up any minute.” Sure enough, I heard sirens screaming down la Rue du Bac.

I looked at Dieter cautiously. “Are you okay?”

He was breathing hard. “He told me he killed you,” he said, voice shaky.

“He tried,” I said.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“Burning building will do that to you,” I said.

“That son of a bitch.” Dieter approached me, horrified. He touched my sweaty, dirt-smudged face.

Then, the police arrived. If I’m being honest, I tuned most of it out. I was just too tired. They asked me some questions, which got answered laboriously with my limited French and their limited English. It’s not like they have a vocabulary section in grade school foreign language classes for “Words you Need to Know if a Local Tries to Kill you with Fire.”

Finally, Dieter’s office was quiet. He examined my hands. They were cut up and bloody. “How did this happen?” he said.

I pulled his knife out of my pocket and handed it to him. “You saved my life.”

He looked like he might cry. “I put you in danger in the first place.”

“I’m perfectly capable of putting myself in danger, thanks,” I said.

Dieter put the knife back in my hand. “You will never need to use it again, if I have anything to say about it.”

“Really?” I teased. “Because it seems like you could have used a blade yourself, considering what I walked in on.”

Dieter rolled his eyes. “He had a gun, Elizabeth.”

“I had a guitar. We were evenly matched,” I said. “Sorry about that, by the way.” I cringed.

“It’s alright,” he said, looking down at the remnants of his guitar. “It served both of us better as a bludgeon than a musical instrument. _You_ saved _my_ life,” he added, stepping over the guitar to close the gap between us. He was still holding my hand.

“It was only fair,” I said. My heartbeat picked up again.

“If he had shot you,” he murmured. “I don’t know what I would have done.”

            “He didn’t,” I said, my voice wavering.

            “He would have.”

            “I know,” I said, putting the knife in my pocket and taking his other hand.

            “Heather is going to be so angry with me,” he said. “I almost got her roommate killed.”

            “Paris is turning out to be terrible for my blood pressure,” I admitted.

            “You haven’t even seen the Eiffel Tower.”

            “Yeah,” I sighed, leaning into his chest.

            “Do you want to?”

            I forgot what we were talking about. “… want to what?”

            “See the Eiffel Tower,” he said quietly, rocking me side to side in his arms.

            “As long as I get to see it on a contact sheet,” I said into his shoulder.

            “You are never fired again.”

            For a long time, we stood still, eyes closed, in the middle of the room.

\----

            I sat next to Dieter on his bed, pointing at the camera in his lap. “This one is supposed to be good for filming at night, right?” I said, pressing it.

            “No, Elizabeth,” cried Dieter, throwing up his hands. “That one opens the back of the camera!”

            “Oh no,” I said, dismayed. I put my head in my hands.

            He sighed. We had been at it for way too long.

            My shoulders started shaking.

            “Are you crying?” he said, alarmed. He put one hand on my back and handed me his handkerchief with the other. “What’s wrong?”

            “I exposed an entire roll of film,” I sobbed. “I’m so sorry.”

            “No, you didn’t,” he chuckled.

            “What?” I looked up at him through the tears in my eyes.

            “You really think I’m going to let you expose an entire roll of film?” He kissed me on the cheek. “It’s a dummy roll.” He didn’t stop laughing.

            “Ugh,” I moaned. “You’re the worst!”

            “Says the girl with a brand new visa,” he teased. He traced the burn scar on my leg with his finger. I wove my fingers in between his.

“Nothing whatsoever to do with you,” I grumbled, but I knew the fact wouldn’t deter him from teasing me for the rest of the month. Or my life. “Speaking of which, pretty soon you’re going to have to start letting go of me for at least some of the day.”

            “That hardly seems fair,” he said.

            “No one gets to have this much fun on a student visa. It’s unheard of.”

            “I’ll contact the school and offer to lecture your class on photo composition,” Dieter joked, closing the camera back up.

            “You do that enough here,” I complained with a grand gesture at his room.

            “Yes, I assume a college lecture involves pants.”

            “You’re already wearing”- I looked down at my legs. “Oh.”

            He fished my second favorite pair of jeans from the foot of the bed and draped them over my head. “You’re ridiculous.”

            “Oh, I’m ridiculous.” I side-eyed him while I put my pants on. “What’s got you in such a good mood there, Angela Merkel?”

            “I get to keep you,” he said, tossing the camera into a pile of pillows. Dieter grabbed the shirt out of my hand before I could put it on and pulled me into a bear hug, leaving a dotted line of kisses from my shoulder to my jaw.

            “Yeah,” I said. “You do.” I jumped up and wrapped my legs around his waist. He caught me and we made an attempt at a passionate kiss, but honestly, we just couldn’t stop smiling long enough to manage that.

 


	3. Bruises

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning for the next few chapters: mass shooting.  
> (Also, bad French. Sorry.)

“Is this a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” I rummaged around in the paper bag.

               Dieter blushed and hastily turned around, but not fast enough to hide it. “I thought turkey would become disgusting in your knapsack,” he said.

               “You’ve made me lunch before,” I replied, ignoring his sandwich preference rationale. “But I don’t believe it’s ever been peanut butter and jelly.” I wrapped my arms around his midsection and hugged him from behind.

               “Can’t there be a first time for everything?” he barked.

               I closed my eyes and smelled his sweater vest. Dieter’s aftershave had a strong, distinctive smell. That day he seemed to have spilt it down his shirt. “Why is it that you’re more nervous than I am?” I said.

               “You never panic when you ought to. Someone has to pick up the slack.”

               “I’ll be fine, Dieter.

               “I can’t shake the feeling that you are going to walk into more trouble,” said Dieter. “Since the events of the winter, I just want to wrap you in my arms and never let you go anywhere alone.”

               I shrugged. “I kind of want to wrap _myself_ in my arms and never go anywhere at all.”

               “How are you doing this?” Dieter said, voice muffled by my hair. “How does one move past such a thing?”

               I didn’t say anything in response. One didn’t move past such a thing. In my mind’s eye, I flashed back to the many times I’d awoken in the middle of the night and, half-awake, instinctively checked every latch and bolt in Dieter’s entire apartment. Dieter, none the wiser, hadn’t even woken up. The can of mace in my bag felt somehow heavier as he stood there, smelling my hair. I tried to ignore the itchy tingling sensation rising in my leg where the fire had singed my nerve endings.

               “Do you want me to walk you to the train?” he said.

               I kissed him on the lips and grabbed my bag on the way out.

              

               The last orientation session for incoming students was scheduled a week before the first day of class. The administrator spoke French, but I was able to catch almost every word (I have an app that translates anything I haven’t learned from Heather, Dieter, or grade school.). I took several copies of the campus map.

I tuned out the first part of the tour. I really don’t care when the buildings were built. Nobody does. Sorry, college administrators. Nobody cares. People at orientation just want to know the quickest way to get to class and where it’s acceptable to sleep on campus. Allow me to clarify: Most people. Some people apparently go to orientation just to be a thorn in my side. I was looking up “fen^etre” in my phone when a derisive snort drew my attention to the guy next to me. “What?” I said.

“Chill out,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’s orientation. Nobody cares when the buildings were built.” For some reason, it really irked me that he’d voiced my thought.

 _Window_. The word meant window. “Maybe you don’t care,” I said. He just laughed. The administrator was taking questions, so I raised my hand and, in painstaking French, asked if there was a cafeteria on-campus.

“That is an excellent question,” she said. “The campus is too small to have a cafeteria, but there is a snack shop across from the library and the neighborhood is full of restaurants.”

I nodded to indicate that I understood.

“It is always a pleasure to have foreign students here at la `Ecole d’Art,” continued the administrator. “Welcome to Paris!”

“Merci,” I said, and resumed glaring daggers at the annoying guy next to me.

“Wow, maybe you should enroll in some French classes,” he drawled, not even bothering to keep his voice down. “You obviously need them.”

 _If he’s in any of my classes, I’m going to scream_ , I thought. I’m surprised my eyes didn’t burn holes in the sweatshirt of the student walking in front of me. “Great,” I said. “I was listening when she told us where the language office is.”

He fell silent. One or two of the other new students tittered, but the rest either didn’t care or weren’t fluent enough in English to follow the conversation. He raked his fingers through the wavy black hair falling in his eyes. His unbuttoned plaid shirt was several sizes too large for him and one of his designer shoes was duct-taped together. As if I could dislike him any more than I already did, he was also one of those boys who are born with really pretty eyelashes and don’t understand the divine gift they’ve been given. I didn’t look at him for the rest of the tour.

Inside the building, down the hall, there was a slam. My pulse quickened. My head whipped around, eyes darting about in search of the source of the sound… Someone had dropped a book. I took a few deep breaths. One of the other girls in the tour group looked concerned at my panicked response. “Are you alright?” she asked, slowing down to match my pace.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said shakily. “I’m not great with loud noises.”

“It echoes in here, I suppose,” she said. The building had high ceilings and stone carvings. “I’m Sofia,” said the girl.

My eyes narrowed. Something about her seemed familiar. The laughing blue eyes… the shape of her nose…

“Sorry, is there a problem?” she said, eyebrows creasing her forehead. That was what gave it all away.

“Are you Dieter’s sister?”

Her mouth fell open. “How do you know my brother?” she said. We lowered our voices as the others shot us a few dirty looks.

“I’m Elizabeth Clarke. We’re um… Well, we… I’m…” I said haltingly.

“The girlfriend!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands and gleefully bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Oh, it’s so good to finally meet you!” She pulled me into a tight hug. The tour advanced ahead of us by several meters.

“He has so many stories about you.”

“Ah, how embarrassing,” she said, covering her delicate mouth with her hand as she giggled sheepishly. “So you’ve heard about the boating trip we took when I was seven?”

I tried to restrain my laughter, but it came out as a snort. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I said, blushing.

“He tells everyone that story! I can’t imagine why.” She smoothed her pale pink cardigan and pleated corduroy skirt. She looked like she belonged in that hallway, down to the penny loafers and pearl earrings. She might as well have been lounging draped over a gargoyle, for the impression she gave me.

“To be fair, I don’t know that I would have known how to operate a motorboat at that age, either,” I said. “I’ve always sided with you on this one.” I craned my neck to see where the tour had gone. They were rounding the corner ahead of us.

               “Don’t worry about the tour,” said Sofia, waving a dismissive hand. “Around the corner are the chemistry laboratories, and then you’ve seen the whole campus.”

               “How many times have you taken this tour?” I asked, mostly rhetorically. I just wanted to keep talking to Sofia. She was Dieter’s outgoing counterpart, endearing and charming upon a first impression.

               She rolled her eyes a little bit. “I suppose I was hoping to assuage my nerves by taking the tour again. It’s silly, I know…”

               “Not at all,” I said. “You’ll be doubly prepared!”

               She cringed. “Or… quadruply?”

               “You took four campus tours?” I cried out. If a Von Schwesterkrank is going to do something, they’re not going to half-ass it.

               “Hey, my mother dragged me to the first one!” she said, pointing a finger. “It’s hard to get the feel for a place with your mother breathing down your neck!”

               “Oh, you’re still in contact with…” I trailed off, second-guessing my choice of personal question.

               She waved away my awkwardness. “Dieter comes around for holidays and sends plenty of letters and birthday cards.”

               “What happened?” I asked, and then added hurriedly, “If you don’t mind my asking. Dieter doesn’t really talk about it.”

               She stared into the distance while she fiddled with a lock of her straight blond hair. “I suppose he wouldn’t. You see, our parents are a doctor and a soldier – very traditional people – so when Dieter decided to study photography, it rubbed the whole family the wrong way. Even after our parents made peace with their artistically inclined children, Dieter had trouble forgiving and forgetting.”

               “That must be difficult. Do you miss him? You’ve been in Germany, right?”

               “He’s easy to miss,” she said. “You know what I’m talking about. You moved across the hemisphere to be with him.”

               I didn’t argue with that.

               “There are some changes in life that leave you better off,” she said, linking arms with me and leading me back up the corridor. “But Dieter packing overnight and getting on a train to France before I woke up in the morning was the kind of change that just leaves bruises.”

               We walked in silence for a while.

              

               Half an hour later, we were sharing a soft pretzel down the street from the school. “Why are they so good with mustard?” said Sofia. “Can you imagine dipping normal-sized pretzels into mustard?”

               “Hey, where are you living while you go to classes?” I said, through a mouthful of pretzel. Bread is, hands down, the best cure for sad, awkward silences.

               “I was hoping to stay with Dieter at first, but it looks like I’ll be moving into a flat a short metro ride from here.”

               “I can’t believe he would let you do that!” I objected.

               Sofia wiped some mustard off of her chin. “He doesn’t know I’m in town. I was going to call him tomorrow.”

               “Any chance you could make that today?” I asked sheepishly. “I’m supposed to spend the night at his place and I don’t think I can keep my mouth shut.”

               She laughed and pulled out her phone. The case was pink with a blue plaid pattern and a rhinestone-studded bow. She selected Dieter’s number and set the phone down in the middle of the table. It rang for a few seconds.

               Anyway, Dieter picked up the phone, the two of them caught up, and that’s the abbreviated story of why I tripped over Sofia’s patent leather mary janes on my way out of Dieter’s apartment on the first day of school. Because it turns out, I was right – he would never have allowed her to rent a flat downtown when he had a spare room.

               “Watch it,” she said, moving her shoes out of the reach of my clumsiness. “Those are a designer brand.”

               “Oh yeah?” I teased. “Which one?”

               She gave me a wounded look. “Don’t you go calling my bluffs!”

               “When you shop with someone, you can’t lie to them.” I learned that from Heather.

               We headed out together.

 

               “Classes went… okay.

               They were fine.

               Really, they weren’t that bad.”

               “Will you cut it out for a minute? I’m trying to call Dieter. We’re out of eggs,” grumbled Sofia from the other room. “Besides, the first day is a little early in the semester to hate your schedule. What tipped the scales?”

               _The annoying dude from orientation is in four of my five classes,_ I thought. _That’s what tipped the scales_. “I think Dieter’s in the darkroom right now,” I said, checking my watch. “He might not answer.”

               Sofia popped her head into Dieter’s study. “Do you think you could step out and get a few things from the store?”

               “I wish I could, but I promised Heather I’d make her dinner and I’m already fighting peak Metro traffic.”

               She groaned. “I guess I’ll do it myself. Is there anything you want me to get for you?”

               “Ooh!” I rummaged around in my bag and pulled out a coupon. “I think you can get half off on frozen tuna at the market with this.”

               “Frozen tuna? I wouldn’t even know what to do with that.” She flipped the coupon over in her hand. “It’s a reasonable price though.”

               “You can put it in a skillet or a griddle with some teriyaki sauce,” I said, zipping up my boots. “I’ll make some for you guys next time I stay over. Get a kilo for the freezer!” Dieter has an extra freezer, which sounds totally weird until you realize he spends too much time developing photos to shop for and eat fresh food. The man is a master at defrosting things.

               Sofia kissed me on the cheek as I left the apartment, calling after me, “You’d better stop promising people dinner!”

               “It’s going to be good!” I grinned and waved over my shoulder on my way to the elevator.

               On the train to Heather’s, I turned over everything that had happened that day in my head. My required figure-drawing class was taught by the kind of woman I always picture when I think of an art teacher. She wore muumuus in bold colors and wild shapes dangled from her earlobes. She carried a thermos of green tea and a book on meditation. She reminded me of my very first art teacher, back in elementary school. I smiled a little at the memory of my first art classes. The train made a resounding _CLACK_ , and my gasp turned a few heads. I felt lightheaded all of a sudden. I took slow, even breaths until the train reached my stop. My leg itched.

 

               It took a few minutes the next morning to chart a Metro route from Heather’s apartment to the college. I took a highlighter to a printed-out map while Heather whipped up an omelet (secret ingredient: last night’s leftovers. I’m serious – seven times out of ten, if you scrape your dinner leftovers into a pan with some eggs, you’re good to go.). I shooed her off to get ready to go to work. “You live in ‘The Devil Wears Prada;’ there’s no way you have time to be scrambling eggs.”

               My phone beeped Dieter’s customized ringtone (it’s that one old British folk song about the woman and the stars). “Dieter, hey! I’m just about to leave for class.”

               “I just wanted to wish you luck today,” he said. “I’m heading to the darkroom around noon and that’s where I’ll be until five. Is this a secure line?”

               “It’s a cell phone line, I guess,” I said. “I don’t know how secure that is.”

               “So, nobody is listening,” he murmured.

               “No sexy German distractions,” I chided, realizing what he was about to try to do. “Not after the last incident!”

               His laugh deflated slightly. “Ah, you win. That was pretty humiliating.”

               “I love you and I’ll see you at six,” I said.

               As I was hanging up, Heather rushed back in with her portfolio and jacket. “Are you going to be okay getting down there by yourself?”

               I jumped out of my skin. “What? No, yeah, why? See you later!”

               She stopped short, eyebrow raised. “Who was that on the phone?”

               “No one!”

               Heather rolled her eyes. “Don’t most people just sext nowadays?”

               “And I’m going,” I said, tripping over my feet to get out of the room.

              

               My first class that day was a straightforward seminar course. I divided my binder into subsections, one for each material mentioned on the syllabus. As I did so, a derisive snort came from one seat over. “Can I help you?” I said, without bothering to look at the annoying boy. He was wearing the same plaid shirt he had slouched through orientation in.

               “Ooh, attitude,” he shot back. “What’s with the anal-retentive note-taking? Scared you’ll forget your brain after class ends?”

               “If you don’t want to learn anything, what are you doing here?” I said.

               “Higher education expands the mind,” he said mockingly. “Haven’t you heard?”

               “I guess that’s going to be hard for you. After all, some things are just… small.” Sofia, on the other side of me, had a suspicious fake coughing fit.

               The teacher launched into a demonstration just then, so our conversation was cut short, but the asshole shot me a dirty look as he twirled a cigarette on the table in front of him.

 

               “Do you like kale or spinach better?” I asked Dieter.

               “It doesn’t matter as long as I get to look at you while I eat it.”

               I hooked his collar with my finger and pulled his lips down to meet mine. “This isn’t a date. Sofia says she won’t speak to us until we restock your refrigerator.”

               “Such a drama queen,” he said, and kissed me again, this time for longer. “Between the two of you, I’m eating the strangest things now.”

               “It is _not_ healthy to live exclusively on power bars,” I insisted. He trailed along behind me as I made my way through the produce section. I guess it was kind of a date. He had taken an afternoon off from work to spend time with me. We probably could have coordinated better; it kind of sucks when your limited hours of date time are eclipsed by grocery shopping.

               “Why don’t we have pizza tonight?” he suggested as we walked through the prepared foods department. “They make them over there.”

               “I guess we haven’t done that in a while,” I said. “Alright, let’s do it.”

               While Dieter ordered a pizza from the woman at the counter, my eye wandered, and I found myself entranced by the fire in the back of the pizza oven. I could feel the heat behind my eyes, and then the noise of the busy grocery store fell away… The heat engulfed me. It was everywhere. The fire was inches from my skin. “Say goodbye to your hot German boyfriend!” reverberated somewhere in the distance.

               Someone put a hand on my shoulder and I struck out at the assailant…

               Dieter yelped in pain.

I was pulled from my dissociative trance. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!”

Dieter pulled away and looked at me like I had killed his puppy. “Elizabeth, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I’m fine,” I said, waving him away and rolling the cart into the bread aisle.

“Then why are you pushing the shopping cart into the employees-only restrooms?”

I rubbed my eyes. Oh. Yeah, wrong way. I sighed. “Can we talk at your place?”

“Of course.” He gently steered the shopping cart and me away from the employees-only restrooms. “Let’s go to the check-out.”

              

               Dieter’s bedroom ceiling has a fascinating pitting pattern that looks like faces if you squint your eyes just right. I’ve spent plenty of nights staring at it, making friends with the ghosts up there. I snuck a peek at Dieter. He was also staring at the ceiling, his mouth a hard line. He’s lived there a long time; I wonder if he has friends amongst the faces.

               “I should go and find him,” he said quietly. “And see how he likes fire now.”

               I let him vent. I was too tired to object.

               “He’s living inside your head!”

               “I made my peace with him.” If only I could forget the trial of Roger Traquenard. It made newspapers, tabloids, and blogs alike. It was splashed across every newsroom green screen from Los Angeles to Moscow. The people didn’t want answers – they knew he did it. They just wanted to gawk, and gawk they did. Guess who was their convenient key eyewitness?

               During the high-profile court proceedings, I received flowers from Jean Mi Traquenard. It’s not like I was pen pals with the guy, but I think he felt partially responsible for the danger I escaped. And if he was disappointed in Roger before, hoo boy. Jean Mi’s only public acknowledgement of this disappointment was the series of pointed contraception ads Glam Glam Magazine ran over the summer. The note attached to the flowers read, “My dear, I deeply regret the way you have been abused by my own flesh and blood. My only consolation is that from his jail cell, he will no longer be able to hurt us. Jean Mi.” For a while, I believed that lie, that insidious spark of hope that putting Roger behind bars would make the nightmares stop.

               “Do you think you should see a psychologist?” said Dieter.

               I continued to stare at the ceiling, doing my best to ignore the nagging discomfort in my burned calf.

               “I’m not going to pester you,” he said, rolling over onto his side to look at me. “But if you need to talk to someone, I’m here, and if you need to talk to someone else, there are plenty of psychologists around.”

               “There’s nothing to talk about.”

               He propped his head up with his hand so he could keep looking at me. “I saw a therapist.” I peeked at his face. He was wearing his Trying to Express Human Emotion face, which is the same as his Trying to Read Instructions for Shelving Unit Assembly face, granted, but somehow I’ve learnt to tell the difference. When he tries to talk about his feelings, he looks like he’s staring down the longest hallway in the world, or into a bottomless pool. I guess it’s because feelings aren’t diagrammed and printed on paper in four different languages.

               “When were you in therapy?” I asked.

               “Three years ago, my teacher passed away,” he replied.

               “Your teacher?”

“I studied with her for eight years,” he elaborated. “She was my mentor. I was grief-stricken.”

               I crawled over to his side of the bed and curled up in the glow of his body heat. “That’s a long time to teach someone.”

               He ran his fingers through my hair. “It still saddens me, of course. Therapy doesn’t erase your problems.”

               “Then what’s the point of it?” I grumbled.

               He was silent for a while. “It can teach you to be strong enough to deal with them.”

               “I’ll think about it,” I said, my voice muffled by the front of his shirt.

               By nature, Dieter isn’t a touchy-feely kind of person. He’d rather map out the entire Paris Metro from memory than map out his own feelings. Sometimes it’s annoying. There was one week in May when he became unpleasant and standoffish at seemingly random times of day, and when I reached my wits’ end and confronted him…

               “Dieter,” I said. “What is your fucking problem?”

               His mouth fell open. “What?”

               “You heard me. What’s that face you keep making?”

               His face flushed. “What face? I’m not making any face. Stop being ridiculous.”

               “Yes, you are.” I grabbed his arm to stop him from escaping to the other room. “All week, you’ve been making this face, like you smell something terrible. What’s the matter? Am I disgusting to you in some way? Is” –

               “No, never!” he interjected.

               “Then why do you keep giving me weird looks?”

               He went very quiet for a while, and then he pulled out his phone. He sighed. “I watched this video. Completely by mistake,” he added hurriedly, and showed me a video clip of a fluffy kitten climbing the leg of a chair.

               I watched the video. “I don’t understand the connection.”

               “It doesn’t matter,” he snapped, snatching the phone out of my hands.

               “Dieter!” I protested.

               He glared at the trash can behind me in order to avoid meeting my gaze and finally admitted, “You remind me of the kitten.”

               “That’s it?” I was dumbfounded.

               You could have heard a pin drop.

               I swatted his shoulder with my hand. “’Completely by mistake,’ my _ass_!”

               “I thought it was a video about a new brand of film,” he said. “A friend sent it to me! Stop laughing.”

               Will Dieter ever live it down? No. No, he will not.

              

              


	4. Annalise and the Pont Neuf Carousel

I arrived to class early on the Friday of my first week of school. Unfortunately, so did my new friend. “You know, there are five empty tables in this room,” I said, not looking up from the sketchbook I was doodling in. “Why do you want to sit right next to me?”

               “You look really familiar,” he said. “Are you some D-list actress or something?”

               “Do you watch porn?” I replied with a straight face.

               He rolled his eyes. “That’s funny, you almost had me there. Seriously, I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

               “Orientation.” I rested my chin on my hand.

               “C’mon, I’m serious.” He wouldn’t look away from my face.

               I slammed my books shut and locked eyes with him. “You really want to know?”

               “Yeah.”

               “Have you been following the Traquenard trial?” I said.

               “Yeah, who hasn’t?” he snorted. “Crazy motherfucker kidnaps a teenage girl and tries to… burn…” I could see him putting the pieces together. His eyes lit up. “Shit, dude, that’s crazy.”

               “The trial was even worse.” I threw down my pencil. “’Let’s rehash your near-death-experience 25 times for a bunch of people you’ve never met!’”

               “It was a pretty short trial, though,” he mused.

               “That’s because it was open-and-shut. The security camera footage was horror movie material.” I gave him a wry smile. “The defense attorney even apologized to me after it was over.”

               He exhaled. Neither of us had bothered to turn on the classroom lights, and every surface of the room was bathed in the blue-gray morning light streaming in through the windows.

               I eyed him, suddenly unsure where we stood. For some reason, the idea of him leaving me alone out of pity disappointed me more than if he’d never made the connection between the Traquenard trial and me. “Are you going to go easy on me now?”

               “Not a chance,” he murmured. “You’re still an annoying, stuck-up special snowflake who I have to see in class every day of my entire week.”

               “And you’re still an asshole who thinks he knows everything about everything,” I said, unzipping my pencil case and rifling through it for an eraser.

               “That’s me,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Peter Ling.”

               I took it. “Elizabeth Clarke.”

               On the surface, as the other students filed into the room and the ugly ceiling lights were switched on, nothing had changed. As the teacher started lecturing, Peter kept up his usual barrage of rude mumbled comments and minor class disruptions, and I continued to take page after page of notes, highlighting this in yellow and that in green. I found myself clinging to the foundation of a normal class period, lobbing a few extra insults at him, trying to escape the nagging feeling that something was different. It wasn’t civil and it wasn’t pleasant, but it was an understanding. I listened to a discordant Modest Mouse album on my way home, trying to drown out the unsettling feeling of two dark brown eyes on my back as I left school.

 

               Since Sofia had moved into Dieter’s apartment, I had been deliberately spending fewer nights there. Three really is a crowd. “Oh, _now_ you want to live here full-time again?” Heather moaned when I asked if my closet space was still available. “Let me ask you this, Beth: Where were you when the pipes rusted and I was taking showers with a hose and a bucket? Exactly.”

               She had a point. I spent the overwhelming majority of nights at Dieter’s place over the summer. I was there so often that I’m on excellent terms with most of his neighbors and he has an Ikea chest of drawers that was, until Sofia moved in, designated specifically for my clothes. Dieter and I weren’t happy about the decrease in the frequency with which we saw each other, but we had to fall to earth from our magical, oblivious honeymoon cloud at some point. Besides, Heather makes American-style barbecue that Dieter can’t touch with his three-power-bar-a-day meal schedule.

              

               A bright blue compact car squealed to a halt in the fire lane by the college and an Australian woman’s voice said, “Next time you want a ride, you better play me fair and square at hangman, you little twat. Go to school!”

The door was thrown open and Peter Ling stumbled out onto the sidewalk. “Screw you, you crazy bitch!” he yelled, and then, off-balance, ran directly into me. “Shit!”

Instinctively, I caught him in my arms. “What the hell was that?” I gestured at the black tire marks in the fire lane.

“My aunt. What a moron; she’s going to destroy those tires.” He pulled free of my grasp. “Fuck off, I’m fine.” Peter headed for the building.

               “What’s her problem?” I said, matching his stride. I don’t know if “concerned” is the right word for my thought process. Perhaps, “curious.”

               “Um…” He shot me a puzzled glance, shoulders slightly hunched, physically blocking me out. “She’s a model.”

               “Stereotypically stuck up, then.” I cringed sympathetically. Living with a respected member of the Paris fashion world? Not as easy as you’d think. In my head, I recalled my ever-growing list of Dieter’s profession-related quirks…

  * Offers “constructive criticism” on my social media photos (It’s Instagram, Dieter, nobody cares)
  * Keeps photo paper under the bed
  * Addendum: Keeping photo paper under the bed is a potential turn-on and may enhance sex for him (wild speculation, honestly)
  * He takes photos of _everything_. The toaster is in an interesting light this morning? Get out of his way. Breakfast can wait.
  * Hates having his picture taken (not sure if this is a direct result of his job or simply a personality quirk)
  * _Loves_ taking pictures of me. (Quote: “You are the most beautiful thing that has ever come into focus on my camera lens.”)
  * The power bars _._ I don’t know what borrowed energy he’s been burning during all those long days and late nights on his feet in the darkroom because when I started to get to know Dieter, I realized that he was barely even eating food. It was terrible. (Sofia sided with me, and between the two of us, we have him eating vegetables almost every day.)
  * I love him anyway.



 

That last one wasn’t actually part of the list. It’s just a true statement. “Wait a minute.” Pieces of a puzzle were starting to converge in my head. Ling? As in… “Is your aunt Jing Jing Ling?” I blurted out.

He sighed. “So what if she is?” He wouldn’t look at me.

I grabbed his shoulder and stopped him before he went into the classroom. “Hey, I won’t mention it to anyone,” I reassured him. “I’m sorry I brought it up.” Of all the industry icons Heather talked about and everyone I read about in the magazines she left all over the apartment, Jing Jing Ling was my fashion hero, paving the way for other plus-size models in _haute couture_. She was supposed to be fearless! People say designers go looking for her, not the other way around, and that she doesn’t let anyone waste her time. Then again, these are gossip magazines. As the image of Peter reeling on the sidewalk by her car played over and over in my head, I started to wonder if Jing Jing Ling was as cool as everyone made her out to be.

Looking back on that day feels strange, like it was something I watched on TV, or a dream – not real life. I wonder if I would have done anything differently that morning if I had known what was going to happen. Would I have kissed Dieter again? Would I have gotten off the metro a few stops early and walked in the fresh air? Skipped school entirely? I don’t know. Out of all the things that could haunt me about that day… it’s that question that really keeps me up at night.

I liked Advanced Mixed Media, because it was a hands-on course and Professor Martin’s only goal seemed to be to teach us how to use art materials intelligently. That sounds like an easy job, but you’d be surprised how many college students apparently think they can blend oil pastel with water-soluble paint. Professor Martin also occasionally turned a blind eye when I pulled out my camera and took close-up shots of my experiments. Dieter occasionally joked that he could teach me more about photography than art school ever could, but I was adamant about enrolling. No way was I going to hang around in my pajamas every day and dust the corners of his apartment while he was at work. I did not move to France to be useless. Besides, I thought if I got a visual arts degree of some sort, I could help Heather move forward in her fashion career. Those poses aren’t going to photograph themselves.

Man, what would I do without Heather? I hid my wide smile by looking down at the elaborate still-life I was putting together with watercolor and mask. You know those bulky recreational vaporizers with the coils of wire and the weird-smelling liquids? Not-quite-smoking-but-still-inhaling-nicotine? The guy diagonally in front of me had his out on his table, which Peter thought was hilarious. “Dude, you’re so cool,” he said out loud, and a few people turned around to see if he was talking to them.

When the classroom finally quieted down, I cleared my throat to get Peter’s attention and held up my dramatic portrait of the poor victim at his desk, surrounded by clouds of noxious vapor. He snorted.

Then, we heard the screaming from down the hall. The French students started to talk amongst themselves, as if… well. As if they didn’t understand why anyone would be screaming inside a school. I shushed everyone, rising slowly out of my chair, and they shot me dirty looks, until the gunfire began. Short bursts echoing down the hall. The hair on my forearms and the back of my neck stood up. The skin prickled on my scar.

 The others mostly seemed confused. Let me tell you, you’ve never seen innocence shattered this way. This kind of tragedy just doesn’t happen here. Back in the States, yeah, it happens all the time because of Super PACs and gun lobbyists (My second cousin back home bought an assault rifle at a Walmart. True story.), but here? In Paris, France? No way. In fact, that’s exactly what I was saying under my breath: “This can’t be happening. Oh my god, this can’t be happening.”

Professor Martin was frozen where he stood. Everyone was paralyzed, wide-eyed, praying to their respective deities that whoever it was would just skip this room. I motioned furiously to Peter, and he turned out the lights. Peter’s an American kid. He knows what’s up.

There was a lull in the noise. I tiptoed to the door, ajar since we had all arrived, and peered out. There was no one in our hallway. “It’s clear,” I whispered to Professor Martin. “But not for long.” He conveyed my words to the other students. With my shaking hands, I opened the door, slowly, wincing at each minute creak of the hinges. I tried to will away the tremors, but they rolled through my entire body like an electrical current.

“Quiet,” he told them in French, but motioned for them to follow me.

“Library,” I hissed, guiding each terrified student through the door and around the corner. The library of L’`Ecole d’Art was a grand, three-story affair that took over almost an entire wing of the building. The floor-to-ceiling window wall looked out on the grounds and, for our purposes, there were three ground-floor exits. Everyone stopped at the foot of the stairs, deer in the headlights. Most of them were looking at me for a cue. My eyes darted around the room, settling on the emergency exit. I started to open my mouth to direct everyone out of the building, when my ears detected a faint squeaking of thick-soled boots on linoleum. The footsteps were slow, so even. They got louder and louder. A few people looked around for cover. A terrified girl beside me was moving her lips in a silent prayer as the shooter opened the door to the library.

“Hide,” I ordered them, and ran for cover.

They scattered.

I froze for a moment, suddenly unsure of what to do. Metallic clanks resounded on the staircase. I dived under a computer table and found myself looking straight into the eyes of Peter, crouching under a table across the room. He put one finger to his lips.

As footsteps drew nearer, I translated the shooter’s words to the best of my ability. “You can’t hide,” he crooned. “Come out, come out, little mice. Come… out…”

One of the girls screamed. “No! No, no, no,” she sobbed. There was a crash, like furniture being thrown.

“There you are,” said the shooter, and the sickening sound of a machine gun opening fire reverberated around the library. Bullets shattered glass.

My eyes darted around the part of the room visible from under the table, and then back to Peter, who shook his head minutely. I jerked my head in the direction of the gunfire and he mouthed, “ _Don’t_.”

There were more screams, and more gunshots in quick succession. I crept out of my hiding place to where I could see the gunman.

“Don’t,” Peter whispered, audibly this time. “Moron!”

I grabbed a hardcover book and lobbed it, like a frisbee, across the room where it struck a column a few feet from the shooter, and then I dove for cover under the table with Peter.

“Who the fuck did that?” bellowed the gunman.

Peter made a silent gesture of, “What the hell is wrong with you?” He probably meant that I was an idiot for throwing shit at the guy with the machine gun, but he might have also meant that it was crowded with two of us under one table. “Oops,” I whispered into his ear, which was suddenly very close to my mouth.

The gunman was still shouting about how he was going to find whoever threw that book and tear off this limb and that, and so on. My stomach was tied in knots. _He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. Stay still, he doesn’t know._ Peter had a grip on my arm, whether to stop me from perpetrating further stupidity or to make one of us feel safe, I’m not sure. Then, something altogether unexpected happened: another book flew across the room. I could tell it was a book because of the fluttering sound the pages made, and the papery sound of impact.

Peter’s eyes were like saucers, and I’m willing to bet mine were, too. A third book was catapulted across the library, and then another, and then I stopped counting. Don’t you ever make a joke about “weak French people” again. _Do they know they’re going to die?_

The gunman started shooting again, and there were more screams. Screams, and moaning. Peter’s face was greyish, and he looked like he might throw up. They say there’s no atheist in a foxhole. In a silent moment, I realized that in the back of my mind, a tiny voice was humming one of the only Jewish prayers I remembered from my childhood. I couldn’t recall the words.

As the gunshots drew closer to where we were, I looked down at my hands. I couldn’t remember wrapping my arms around Peter, or him burying his face in my shoulder. Professor Martin was under a nearby study table with three other students, and we all looked at each other. We weren’t going to graduate from college.

Professor Martin made the sign of the cross over his chest and stood up. The other students under the table covered their mouths; one cried, “No!”

“Ready to die, old man?” taunted the shooter.

Peter and I clung to each other for dear life. All I could see of Professor Martin was below the knees, facing off with the black combat boots of the gunman. Voice wavering but never breaking, he launched into a speech in French. It took a few words before I recognized it as the Lord’s Prayer.

“Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” he shouted, so that the words ricocheted around the silent library. And then, a series of gunshots sprayed across the bookshelves, now only a meter away from us, and Professor Martin choked, and his knees buckled underneath him. And he fell, eyes open, looking straight at me. The light left his eyes slowly, like the expanding red pool on the floor around him. “On earth… as it is in heaven…” he gasped, and then fell silent. The shaggy rug on the floor was matted with blood.

One of the girls under the other table shakily clutched her cell phone.

“Heaven won’t save you,” said the shooter, and another influx of bullets came, this time very close to us.

Peter cried out in pain.

“Oh my god, you’re hit,” I said, but he pushed me face-down onto the floor and lay on top of me.

“Shhhh. Be still.” I felt a warm, wet sensation on my back. Drip… Drip… Drip… Peter’s breathing was ragged.

The gunman flipped over our table. Amid the sounds of dying and the gunman’s taunts, we lay as still as possible. The other girl’s sparkly, bright pink cell phone lay inches from her twitching hand. The hand spasmed once more and then fell to the floor, lifeless. _I think I have that nail polish color._ The smiling anthropomorphic cupcake charm hanging from the cell phone was staring me down. My leg scar itched.

You know how I generally apologize beforehand, when I recount bullshit that was precipitated by me? Well, what happened next was definitely my fault. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to make me feel better.

               “Alright,” announced the shooter. “Let’s play, ‘Who’s still breathing?’” Then, that fucker made the mistake of kicking me in the ribs.

               I grabbed his leg and pulled as hard as I could.

               “Stupid bitch!” He lost his balance and toppled backwards, his body falling to the floor, gun landing just out of his reach.

               “Elizabeth!” Peter screamed. His breathing was ragged.

               I knew there was no way I was going to pin him down for long, but maybe just long enough. When he looked up, his nose was in the barrel of his own gun. “You don’t want to move,” I yelled, sweat dripping into my eyes, or were those tears? “I don’t know how to use this thing and I don’t care if I shoot you!” My voice cracked and a sob came out.

               The library door slammed open. “Don’t move!” ordered Campus Security. “Put down the weapon!”

               I dropped the full weight of the machine gun directly onto the gunman’s nose and put my hands behind my head. “Ow,” yelped the gunman as gravity brought a loaded assault weapon down on his face.

               I looked around at Peter, who was wheezing and clutching his left shoulder, but gave me a feeble thumbs up before slumping to the floor and giving in to absolute delirium.

               The Campus Security officers zip-tied the shooter’s wrists and radioed for the police.

               The paramedics carried Peter away on a gurney, pulling our hands apart.

               Sofia wedged herself into a corner, sobbing, face and clothes streaked with blood. She wouldn’t let anyone touch her.

               So

               many

               bodies.

               Covered faces, lined up against the library wall.

              

               My phone buzzed again, and for the twelfth or fifteenth time, I deliberately did not check the screen. I shoved it further down in my purse. It gave a short buzz to indicate that I’d gotten another voicemail. You’d think a “Go away” text would make people leave you alone. I eyed the clock. I’d been there for six hours.

               “You can’t stay here,” the nurse had said. “Only family members can stay past 11:00.” Her name tag said Annalise.

               “Do you see any of those?” I said.

               She looked at me for a long moment, and then left without a word. “Just don’t make any trouble,” she said as she closed the door behind her. The wedge of light cast on the floor from the hallway got thinner until it was eclipsed by the darkness in the room. There was no window, and the only light came from a beeping monitor with LED widgets I could swear were faces if I squinted my eyes.

               Peter was in a joint hospital room with one of the other girls who had been shot at the school. Whereas he was under sedation for pain, she was comatose. I’d never met her, but I had just awoken from a nightmare in which she stood up and, dead eyes staring right through me, smothered me with a pillow. Occasionally Peter would twitch in his drugged sleep and I would sit bolt-upright, only to find that he was still under. I got four more phone calls. I turned off my phone.

              

I squinted, shielding my eyes from the blinding sunlight filtering through the trees. _How did I get here?_ The Pont Neuf carousel sounded like it was underwater.

“I’m coming back for you,” said the sallow gunman, gun barrel pressed against my chest. His voice echoed like we were standing in a tunnel. The sun gleamed on his black body armor.

“What?” I said, looking all around me. The park was empty. The children’s laughter died down, became distorted like a broken record, and ceased as my eyes focused on the carousel. The horses pranced in a shimmering circle without riders.

My eyes snapped back to the shooter’s face, but standing before me in full body armor and poised to take a point-blank shot at me was Dieter. “I’m coming back for you,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

 

I opened my eyes.

I was slumped over Peter’s bed.

               When I looked back at the clock, it was early morning. All was quiet on the ward, except for the occasional rattling of a gurney or a cart down the hall, or hushed voices discussing patients who were still asleep.

               Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I gasped, my heart doing a terrifying somersault, but it was the same nurse from the night before. I cringed, expecting a rebuke, but her eyes were soft. “May I speak with you?” she whispered.

               I looked back at him.

               “He’s not going anywhere anytime soon,” she said. “Come on, dear, there’s fresh coffee downstairs.” She dropped a single yellow tulip on his bedside table.

               Hesitantly, I stood up and grabbed my purse.

               The makeup from the day before was smudged, some of it streaked down my cheeks. The face I saw reflected in the glass doors was ghoulish. There were windows downstairs, but the sky was mostly dark outside. I paid a franc for a cup of coffee and we sat down on the chairs in the lobby. I didn’t say a word.

               “You must be very worried.”

               I took a sip of coffee. It was awful.

               “Where you at the scene of the accident?”

               “’Accident’,” I grunted. “That’s a joke he’d appreciate.” I watched hospital staff members go to and fro, getting ready for a change of shifts.

The nurse said, “You can’t protect him by standing around here.”

               “I can’t protect him at all, as a matter of fact.” I gulped down some more coffee. “Did you see that hole in him?”

               “I’ve seen what’s under those dressings. You couldn’t possibly have prevented that,” she replied.

               “There’s no one else to blame,” I said, tossing my empty coffee cup into the trash and watched a group of nurses head for the elevators.

               “I’d start with the shooter if I were you.” The sky was getting lighter.

               “Well, he’s not here right now. I’ve got limited options to work with.”

               Annalise and I watched the sunrise in silence. “Visiting times start in three hours,” she said, as the birds began to sing and the sun crept over the treetops. “Take a break. Answer your phone. Eat something.”

               I didn’t feel like doing any of those things, but for the record, I tried. I bought a sandwich across the street and immediately puked it up in the restroom, took a fifteen-minute nap in an uncomfortable plastic chair in the hospital lobby that culminated in fire nightmares and an itchy leg, and turned my phone back on to find that it only had 3% battery. Potential energy is a bitch. So is sleep and, I guess, food.

               As soon as my three-hour purgatory period was up, I was back in Peter’s room. Something was different, though; the curtain was drawn back, and the other bed was empty. The sheets were clean and pressed, everything spotless, like there hadn’t been anyone there to begin with. I whipped around to make sure Peter was still there. Heart pounding unnaturally, in spite of the beeping monitor, I leaned over his bed and checked his wrist with two fingers for a pulse. It was steady. I exhaled, and tried not to look at the empty bed.

               And I sat there. The windowless room gave the illusion of an absence of the passing of time. Peter’s belly rose and fell with each breath he took, like his body was counting the seconds, and I stopped watching the clock. The ticking of the second hand faded away into the grey of the walls.

               He coughed.

               “Oh my god,” I tried to say, but my throat was too dry to make a sound. I rose. “Peter?” I whispered.

               He coughed again, and gasped for breath, emitting sort of a strangled yelp. He raised both of his arms.

               “Peter,” I said, my voice returned. I pressed his injured arm back into the mattress. “I’m here, you’re okay! Don’t move your arm.”

               His bleary eyes focused gradually on my face. “Where is this?” he mumbled.

               “You’re in the hospital.” I moved his hair out of his eye.

               “What…” Peter narrowed his eyes and struggled to sit up. His mouth fell open when it clicked. “I got shot.”

               I pressed the switch to tilt his bed up so that he could look around the room.

               “Are you okay?” he asked in his sleepy, gravelly voice.

               “Yeah, I tackled the guy and most of us are safe,” I said, a little distracted by the buttons and levers on the bed. “I’m going to call a nurse.”

               “You did _what_?”

               “I called the nurse,” I said matter-of-factly, pointing at the help button on the side of his bed.

               “No, you _tackled_ him?”

               “What? Oh, yeah,” I said. “Kind of.”

               “Liar.”

               “Hey, he shot my friend and I got mad,” I retorted.

               He paused. “What friend?”

               “You.”

               Peter closed his eyes. “I’m not your friend,” he mumbled.

               “You saved my life,” I pointed out.

               Two nurses converged on him before he had a chance to argue. I took a step back from the fray and checked my phone. I texted Dieter, _At hospital downtown. I’m fine._

               I immediately received a reply: _Come home._

               I typed, _I need some time._

               _Come home now._

               “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I said. “Is that okay?”

               “Yeah, sure,” said Peter, recoiling as the nurse tried to adjust his IV. “Fucking whatever. I’m not fucking going anywhere.”

               Halfway out the door, I stopped. “Wait,” I said, tapping one of the nurses on the shoulder. “What happened to Annalise? I’d like to say thank you.”

               Her brow furrowed. “Who?”

               “The other nurse who’s been caring for him,” I said. “She left that flower…” When I looked for the yellow tulip, the bedside table was empty.

               “No one by that name works here,” said the nurse. “Perhaps you mistook her name.”

Looking around the room, I forgot, for a moment, how to leave. Suddenly, the ticking of the clock was like a hammer inside my head. I headed for the elevator.

 


	5. Intervention

I let myself into Dieter’s apartment with my extra key. Sofia, eyes red, hair up in a messy ponytail, sat staring into a cold cup of coffee and didn’t get up when I came into the kitchen. All the lights were off. “He’s in his bedroom,” she said.

“Why are all the lights off?” I dumped her untouched cup in the sink and fished around in a cabinet for the coffee filters.

“Dieter has a headache.”

“But he’s in his room?” I said.

“I have a headache.”

“How many cups of coffee have you had?”

“I stopped counting after 6,” she said in a monotone.

I put the coffee filters back in the cabinet. “I’m going to go and talk to him,” I said. The apartment was like a tomb.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” said Sofia softly as I walked away.

“What?”

“Ask him what he wants for dinner,” she said.

~

“Dieter.” I knocked on the door three more times. “You can’t order me to come home and then ignore me forever when I get here.”

The door swung open. Dieter was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans that looked slept-in and his eyes were bloodshot.

I pushed my way into the room. Predictably, it was dark, and the bed was half-made. “Ouch,” I cried as I stepped on something sharp. It was a shard of black plastic with small holes in it. There was a pile of black plastic shards, mixed in with some shiny metal pieces and a dial with numbers on it. “Was this your radio? What did you hit this with?”

“It was a piece of junk. I hit it against the wall and it shattered like an egg,” he complained.

I swept all the broken radio pieces into a pile. “I’m not sure the warranty covers this.”

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.”

When I stood back up, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the closed curtains of the window. “I haven’t heard from you in over 24 hours,” he told the curtains.

“My friend got shot,” I said.

“And did your phone also get shot?”

“I get where you’re coming from.”

He turned around and looked at me. “Do you?”

I took a deep breath, about to say something, but I lost my train of thought and exhaled. “What?” I genuinely didn’t understand. _Is he just tired, or is he mad at me?_

“I didn’t give you a key to my apartment and offer up half of my beating heart on a platter to you so that you could go out and get yourself killed!” he snapped. The “beating heart on a platter” bit sounded really harsh in a German accent.

 _I guess that answers that question_. “I don’t understand why you’re angry at me, Dieter. I”-

He interrupted me, “When are you going to stop?”

               I gaped at him, distracted by the sound of rush-hour traffic outside. My gaze drifted to the mottled purple sky outside the window. “What time is it?” I murmured.

               “It’s 7:00 in the evening,” said Dieter quietly. “It’s been over 24 hours.”

               My eyes locked onto his face. “When am I going to… stop?”

               “When are you going to be done reliving Roger Traquenard?” he said, rubbing his eyes.

               _What?_ “Roger Traquenard has nothing to do with this,” I said, confused. “My friend got shot,” I repeated, wondering if maybe Dieter hadn’t heard.

               “Roger Traquenard has everything to do with this. Is this your life now? You take down gunmen to fill some sick void inside yourself? Jump in front of bullets to erase the pain you hold inside?”

               “It’s not like that,” I argued. “He was hurting people! You should have heard him, stomping around like some skinhead grim reaper.”

               “Did it have to be you?”

Something about the heartbreak written in the lines of his face sucked the air out of my lungs and all I could muster was a weak, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not an idiot. I see your flashbacks – jumping at loud noises. The itchy scar.” He pointed at my left calf. “You need to talk to someone.”

It was a standoff. I matched his intense stare for almost a minute, in silence.

Sofia knocked softly on the open door to Dieter’s bedroom. _My bedroom, too._ “Anyone want cookies?”

I broke eye contact. “You made cookies?”

“I… bought some?” she said, her voice lifting at the end, like a question. “They’re chocolate chip.”

I glanced back at Dieter. His head was in his hands. “I’ll have one. Or ten.”

That got a weak smile out of Sofia.

I continued, “And then, you guys can help me find a therapist.”

Dieter looked up at me.

He was about to say something, but the doorbell rang about eight times consecutively, and Sofia had to go and let Heather in before she broke the door down. I couldn’t hear what they were saying in the kitchen, but the hysterical pitches of Heather’s voice were unmistakable, not tempered by Sofia’s tired murmur.

Suddenly, Dieter cracked a grin.

“What? I said.

“You’re going to have to answer to Heather now.”

In spite of myself, I smiled back.

~

               “I don’t really know what I’m supposed to say,” I said. The leather sofa was cold, like the rest of the room, and grey, like the rest of the décor. I ran my thumb over the hem of my shorts.

               A ballpoint pen clicked. “Why don’t you start with why you decided to come here?” Her voice was not soft. It was not kind. It was not really anything. I got sidetracked, wondering what it would be like to live one’s life as a person with a voice that wasn’t really anything – a non-personality. Was it just an act? Did she have kids? Did she talk to her kids like that? She interrupted my musings. “Was it one thing that happened to you?”

               My eyes darted to her face. It was a non-judgmental face. I took a deep breath, imagining the warmth of Dieter’s hand in mine on the train just fifteen minutes ago. “Do you want me to go in with you?” he had said.

“No,” I had replied. “I think I have to do this by myself.” I felt a little sick to my stomach. I’ll deck a murderer with a guitar and wrestle a serial killer for his gun, but apparently talking about my feelings is where my sympathetic nervous system draws the line. Maybe Dieter and I have more in common than I thought.

               Then he’d kissed me on the forehead.

So, I looked the therapist up and down, taking in the plastic clipboard, the grayish-green cardigan, the shiny black shoes. I exhaled. “I guess it was a few things.”     

 


End file.
